Sai Zhang, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical informatics and data science at Yale School of Medicine, is part of Decode ALS, one of 20 international teams recognized with a Discovery Award in the Longitude Prize on ALS, a £7.5 million global challenge.
The award, chosen from nearly 100 entries, provides each winning team with £100,000 and access to the most comprehensive ALS patient dataset ever compiled, featuring genomic sequences of 9,000 patients and epigenomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics data for more than 2,000 cases.
Decode ALS will use AI models trained on whole genome sequencing data from ALS patients to test affected cells and proteins against potential candidate drugs, aiming to directly link genetic causes of ALS to actionable treatments.
Decode ALS is a partnership among the University of Sheffield, Weizmann Institute of Science , Columbia University and Yale University.